Blackout management is desirable to control access to media content, and is typically used to prevent the delivery of certain media content to specific marketing areas. In many scenarios, blackout management is required as a result of a contractual agreement with the rights holders, such as a contractual agreement that commonly exists between a professional sports league, the rights holder, and the sports content broadcaster, the content programmer.
Existing solutions for blackout require the physical installation of integrated receiver decoder (IRD)s in the regional headends of the service provider's network. Content programmers provide media content to service providers and the service providers distribute the content to its subscribers via regional headends. Content programmers blackout access to media content by issuing commands that control designated integrated receiver decoder(s) (IRDs) in the regional headends that serve the blackout region.
It is inefficient and impractical for service providers to deploy IRDs in each of their regional headends to support blackout control. Consider a scenario in which fifteen different regions are supported by a respective fifteen regional headends. In each of the fifteen headends, physical IRDs have to be installed for each transport stream for each content programmer that requires blackout processing. So, in a single headend, often as many as one hundred IRDs have to be deployed (doubling that amount for redundancy) in each regional headend. For just fifteen regions, the number of IRDs to be installed in each regional headend becomes innumerous. Furthermore, to integrate the physical IRD in each headend, ancillary equipment is often needed at both the input of the IRD (to format the inputs to a format readable by the IRD) and at the output of the IRD (to multiplex the output streams).
The current infrastructure, therefore, requires significant power, shelf space, and network router ports sufficient to support all of the IRDs in each regional headend. Thus, the current solutions for blackout management are less than optimal and improved designs are desirable.